Cellular wireless communication systems, and in particular Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, are well known in the art and widely deployed. The High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) Evolution track of Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) will provide dramatically increased data rates by combining multiple-antenna techniques and higher-order modulation. For example, in the downlink, 2×2 multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) transmission and 64-QAM modulation will be used, allowing up to triple the data rates achievable with current, single-antenna transmission and 16-QAM. It is expected that these peak data rates will be achievable in “good conditions,” where the propagation channel-induced interference and interference from other external sources is low. Instead, the receiver front-end impairments are expected to become the limiting factors. Such impairments are particularly troublesome since their impact cannot be removed by means of power allocation or interference coordination. When the desired Signal to Interference Ratio (SIR) at the antenna is made high, the RF impairments will become the dominant disturbance and cause error floors and/or throughput ceilings. Some typical such impairments are IQ imbalance, phase noise, DC leakage, quantization and thermal noise, etc.
In order to take advantage of the MIMO and Higher Order Mode (HOM) features, it has been estimated that the overall receiver front-end output Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) must be several dB higher, compared to that required for single-stream 16-QAM. Improving the quality of the RF circuitry in order to increase the output SNR increases the cost of the hardware considerably. This increase may be avoided or limited if the subsequent baseband processing stage could handle a lower-quality input signal, e.g. by performing additional operations to remove the impairment components.
In a typical cost-efficient RF circuit design, one important front-end impairment is the IQ imbalance. The IQ imbalance can originate at several points in the receiver, such as the local oscillator (LO) (at both the transmitter and the receiver); the variable-gain amplifier (VGA) chain; the analog to digital converter (ADC); and also due to variations in the cut-off frequency in the I and Q selectivity filters, giving rise to undesired signal images. The different IQ imbalance contributions accumulate coherently and hence may comprise one of the most dominant RF impairments. The impact of the IQ imbalance can be reduced to an acceptable level by utilizing an RF design with sufficient quality. However, a lower-quality but more cost-efficient RF front end may be used if the IQ imbalance image component could be removed or significantly reduced by baseband processing.